Growing up on the border of New York and Canada, with winter lingering in our bones from our Swedish mother, and a predisposition for reading in front of the fire, my sister and I embraced snow storms with open arms. And with Blizzard Juno sneaking off in to the night earlier this week, I found myself yet again, eagerly anticipating the quiet that comes with freshly fallen snow, the crisp air, the eerie, fairy tale-like aura that settles after a deep, white-out has swept across the normally, colorful world.

As children, we used to wait on pins and needles, until the winter advisory subsided, so we could dash outside and steal those first moments of silence from the woods. Opening up to the stillness, we made careful footprints in the snowy powder; it was like entering Narnia through the wardrobe. We scrambled under the largest pine tree on the edge of the forest, whose boughs had been weighed down with drifting snow. We’d crouch there, cocooned in winter, straining to catch a sign of the White Witch, her wolves, or a glimpse of a dryad, or Mr. Tumnus. Even now, as I’m older and sadly no longer own a zip-up, snow pant onesie, I step on to my back porch with a cup of coffee in the early light after the snow has finished falling, and listen…